What happened
Amid the nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, Reddit co-founder and former executive chairman Alexis Ohanian announced on June 5, 2020 that he was resigning from the company's board and urged the directors to fill his seat with a Black candidate. Ohanian, who is married to tennis star Serena Williams, framed the move as a way to hold himself and the company accountable on racial justice, and pledged to direct future gains on his Reddit stock toward curbing racial hate, beginning with a $1 million donation to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp.
On June 10, 2020, Reddit named Michael Seibel to the board, fulfilling Ohanian's request. Seibel, a partner and CEO at startup accelerator Y Combinator, which had helped launch Reddit in 2005, became the board's first Black director. The high-profile gesture drew both praise and skepticism, with critics noting that Reddit's content-moderation record on hate speech remained unresolved, an issue the company would attempt to address weeks later with a sweeping policy overhaul.